Surprising data from the front lines of GenAI-focused PR
You’ve probably never heard of Dock Universe.
It’s a website with 30K unique monthly visitors, per SimilarWeb, and a design most people would label “basic” if they were feeling polite.
However, you should learn about Dock Universe, because it offers insights into the future.
How we found this gem
My team and I discovered this website while doing AI-search research in Scrunch for a consumer tech client.
For context, the client is a well-known brand and up against two competitors who are also well-known. Our client is ahead as far as generative search goes.
PR is a big part of the reason. The usual suspects are contributing to success on ChatGPT – placements in Tom’s, Engadget, PC Mag and other tech sites you’ve heard of are being cited by AI engines as source material.
However, a site called Dock Universe was a major fave.
In fact it was more cited than any of the aforementioned sites. Across 140 category-relevant prompts, only Youtube, the brand’s own website and another, much bigger, media site were scraped more frequently.
How is some site no one ever heard of getting so heavily referenced by AI bots?
Mostly, it’s about the purpose of Dock Universe.
I’d hazard a guess that the content here is not (entirely) meant for sentient human beings.
Sure, you can read the articles and they won’t be horrible, but the site seems made for bots to scrape.
Potential tells? Consistent vocab and formatting, minimal references to licensing, lots of evergreen content, lack of visual markers (images, diagrams, rich media). I am not a dev person, but my strong guess is that the back end pieces are super friendly for AI scrapers too.
All of this could be unintentional of course, and I want to be careful about inferring intent. Regardless, the impact of it all is data-backed.
Here’s what I find so fascinating about this:
- It reinforces the notion that traffic matters less now. If we told our clients they had been placed on this website and needed to pay us for that work, they’d tell us to go to hell. I understand why. Based on the old metrics of PR targeting – especially traffic – this site should not matter at all.
- It portends a new sort of PR. We believe that, as a PR firm, we will create several types of campaigns for clients. On a more micro-level, some media lists will have big name publications that matter for brand equity but do zilch for AI search. Others might contain a range of outlets no one has ever heard of but that matter immensely to GenAI engines. Clients are going to need to be open to the possibility of PR teams spending time chasing low-traffic, AI-friendly sites .
- It is emblematic of new opportunities smaller players can grab (for now). Google’s traditional search biz is not going anywhere for a long time. Indeed, GenAI search is a gnat at this point, but it still offers interesting opportunities for smaller players. At least for now, there are going to continue to be major gains at relatively low inputs.
Bottom line: There are more Dock Universes out there. They are not likely as hard to get into as the NY Times. Smaller players, armed with intelligence, can see outsized gains from proper PR targeting. In a GenAI world, your biggest placements might come from sites your clients would never brag about, but that feed the machines driving discovery.